Sermon: Pentecost and the Spirit

[ previous | index | next ]

Pentecost and the Spirit

By Charles Rush

May 31, 1998

day we come to celebrate Pentecost. It remembers a day when the Spirit of God rushed on the disciples during their preaching and they were able to spontaneously communicate with clarity to all the people gathered in Jerusalem. It was a divine mandate of sorts to go to all the ends of the earth and preach the gospel because the promises of God are not the exclusive purview of the Jews, nor are they of the disciples whom Jesus taught.

The disciples came to a realization that there was something about the message of Jesus that was not simply wise, not simply good advice. They came to see that it was consistent with the transcendent force that shoots through the universe.

The gospel of John put it this way. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God And the word dwelt among us full of radiance and glory.' St. Paul used to say that Jesus came to us predestined from the foundations of the universe and returned, seated at the right hand of God. These raise important and difficult questions. Is our world predestined? Are events foreordained for us that we are following like a script? Is our freedom largely an illusion? Or is it just in an ultimate sense that the world is predestined, namely that we were created from God, will return to God, and we are loved by God all along?

I think more and more about the Spirit these days, in light of the discussions that have come from physicists and other scientists than from any specific text from the bible.

Have you ever wondered how the spark jumps the gap? I was reading recently some anthropological research that has helped determine more precisely the time when our primordial ancestors began to speak. Have you ever wondered what it was like when the first humanoid figured out a way to communicate to others? Did they have complex thoughts that were waiting to find a language or was it that the development of language increased the complexity of their thoughts?

Ever wonder what it must have been like for the first guy who figured out how to start a fire, rather than to have to find fires burning and keep them burning? What was the source of that inspiration?

Ever wonder what it was like when those first humans figured out that you could collect seeds and plant them in the ground in an orderly fashion and the crops would grow up right where you live so you wouldn't have to spend your whole life foraging and migrating with the cycle of vegetation?

How about smoking tobacco? Whoever figured that out? Is there a guy somewhere with a journal that says ‘today we smoked dry oak leaves- withering pain in my throat and harsh. Tomorrow, we shall attempt to smoke tobacco. I'm sure there is something out there that will round out the pleasure of good sex."

The Etruscans, the people who lived in Italy before the Romans, built so many of their cities on the tops of hills. They figured out mosquito's were not only a nuisance but that they were making them ill. They built their cities on hills to get away from them. They were one of the first civilizations to figure out that if you drained the swamps, it killed off the mosquitoes and that is what they did all over Italy. What inspired them to make that connection?

I've used this example before but it is the best one I know of to make this point. Stanley Kubrick in ‘2001' has a primordial group of apes on the plain of the Serengeti. They travel across the plain to this monolith, his symbol for God, the transcendent force that runs through the universe, the force that pulls us towards creative complexity. It is a great symbol, I might add. A monolith (or an obelisk) is one of the earliest ways that we depicted God and there is still a monolith at Mecca, a huge block of stone, around which all of the pilgrims dance in honor of the inscrutable mystery of the divine that the monolith represents.

In Kubrick's movie, the monolith communicates with the apes, through a high pitched energy. When the energy sound begins, the apes all begin to jump up and down in an excited manner. It appears that they are willing to endure the hostile conditions of the Serengeti, with its lack of water, just to be around the energy that comes from the monolith.

One day another group of apes comes to the monolith. The two groups square off with one another. The defending group begins jumping around in an aggressive manner, as if to say "Come one step further and I will mess you up." There is excitement in the air, there is fear. The two leaders of the group confront one another. All of a sudden the energy sound comes out of the monolith again. It causes the leader of the defending apes to reach down to the carcass of a dead wildebeest. Unconsciously - almost by accident - he picks a thighbone off the dead carcass and holds it in his hand, swinging it around. The intruding ape leader charges at him and the defending ape leader hits him in the head with the thighbone. He falls to the ground and dies. All the other apes are stunned in silence.

The ape looks at the bone in his hand, he looks back at his fallen enemy. The spark jumps the gap and Homo Faber is born, man the toolmaker. He gloats at his thighbone and you can feel the new born power coursing through his veins. He takes the bone and throws it up into the air and as it spins in the air, Kubrick has it morph into a space rocket floating in a nice even rotation in space.

Kubrick is right that the long march of human history has been one technological invention after another, all the way to the point of a completely fabricated universe we have in outer space. The advent of the space age was a wonderful symbol of our psychic evolution as a species. For the first time, our total environment had been fabricated. We provided our incubus completely on our own. We took the first steps toward leaving our natural habitat entirely. The rest of the movie is about the space man's struggle with the very computer that we have devised, an invention that actually threatens our life.

The list of inventions that changed the fundamental way that we organize ourselves, our very self-understanding, is enormous: the wheel, the dam, irrigation ditches, brass, iron, concrete, writing and the printing press, fossil burning fuels and the engine. The impact of each of these inventions defined their era for millennia (the wheel, dam and irrigation) and later for centuries (brass, iron and concrete, writing).

The increase of knowledge and the way that it shapes us happens exponentially so that the rate of change has been greater in the past century than in the previous 10,000 years. The number of inventions in the twentieth century alone which have been defining for us is staggering: splitting the atom, the telephone, the computer, the laser, gene therapy. Whereas, former eras were defined for a thousand years or centuries by their impact, today we make these leaps forward defined in terms of decades.

What is it that makes all of these inventions come to pass? How is it that exist for so many millennia in one mode and then with a simply cross over from no tools to tools, we are completely changed forever, our minds are also reorganized so we no longer think the same, our complexity is compressed.

Teilhard de Chardin, the great paleontologist, says that this is the way that the Spirit of God has been at work in our world. He describes these moments as a supersaturation, when the curve doubles back on itself and an involution happens which takes the complexity of the species to a new evolutionary level. (He is thinking of a parabola curve on a chart).

As a paleontologist, Teilhard was fascinated by the evolution of the world from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic to the conscious, from the conscious to the self-conscious. He saw this as evidence that the transcendent Spirit of the Universe is pulling us toward a direction of increasing complexity and increasing spiritual transcendence.

He pictures our primordial earth as covered in great seas of molecules of a carbon type. Over the top, he thinks there must have been seas of waters, from which emerged the first traces of future continents. "To an observer equipped with even the most modern instruments of research, our earth probably would have seemed an inanimate desert. Its waters would have left no trace of mobile particles even upon the finest of filters, and the most powerful microscope would have only detected inert aggregates. Then at a given moment, after a sufficient lapse of time (under conditions of great concentration), those same waters here and there must have unquestionably have begun writhing with minute creatures. And from that the initial proliferation stemmed the amazing profusion of organic matter whose matted complexity came for form an envelope around our planet: the biosphere." (The Phenomenon of Man, p. 78) We have the beginning of life.

Again Teilhard pictures the growth and multiplication of single celled organisms covering the earth in great soupy seas until they achieve another supersaturation where they fold in on themselves. Again, something altogether new is born, the multicell organism. Multi-cell organisms develop in an incredible variety: they divide into plant and animal, differentiating over a very long period of time.

But the next critical stage from our vantagepoint comes at the moment when multi-cell organisms become complex enough that they manifest psyche. They become conscious. Still later, out of the incredible variety of conscious life, one species developed in such a way to become self-conscious, Homo Sapien - Humans who know that they know.

At this point, we have developed a self-direction and autonomy where we can say that we are truly free. Only humans, in this sense, are moral creatures. Only with us does it make sense to speak of good and evil because we are the only species to have transcended instinct to such an extent that we have a will for which we are responsible. Our spiritual transcendence begins to take precedence over our instincts and our hormones. So there is a direction to evolution. We are being pulled towards increasing transcendence and sophistication.

Only in the last 30,000 years have we sown grain and herded animals. Only in the last 10,000 have we lived in cities and developed civilization. Only in the last 5,000 years have we left behind objects of art and civilization that illustrate a higher order of living. Only in the last 120 years have we developed radio waves so that someone else in the universe might even know that we are here. Only in the last 30 years have we actually left our atmosphere and explored space.

Perhaps, most importantly, only now do we stand on the edge of being able to understand our genetic make up to such an extent that we can alter the course of our evolution with insight and precision. You can see how the moral ante is upped with each historical era, each level of complexity and development. Only the self-conscious individuals have the power to profoundly alter the shape and destiny of the entire ecosphere. It is only the choices and decisions that we make which determine whether other species become extinct or depleted to a fraction of their present number. That is a tremendous responsibility.

And shortly, we will have enough understanding of our genetic structure; we will have enough technical prowess that we will be able to permanently alter the future course of the gene pool. It is hoped that we will be able to eradicate certain diseases that have plagued us for generations. It is hoped that we will be able to develop our immune system and add not only years but also health to our years. Beyond these hopes, we can only say that we stand at a precipice of a great unknown. But this moment stands as a symbol of our concentration and complexity to the point that we are folding in ourselves to become something more than what had been previously.

The Spiritual' and ‘the moral' become more real with each progressive level of development and their importance becomes far greater. Their impact on the physical realm is much more substantial. How much more important it is that we have spiritual values of compassion, love, reverence, respect, and understanding in an era of such technological power. How much more important that we have a sense of boundaries and a moral compass that guides us.

About 10 years ago, when the Star Wars trilogy was out, I had a house full of little boys running around with laser swords ready to attack Darth Vader on behalf of the rebellion and help out the ewoks. I would have a dozen of these boys running through the middle of the house. If they spoke at all, they would stop and say ‘The Force be with you'. To which I would reply ‘and also with you'.

That is not a bad way of thinking about the transcendent spirit of God that pulls us through the universe, ‘may the force be with you'. And one of the things that the movie made clear was the importance of the spiritual precisely in the age of technological wizardry. We were given the wonderful character of Yoda who centered himself in the force. He understood that technology only increased the sum total of human and world suffering if it was not structured by the spirit of compassionate righteousness. He was such a gentle soul, in marked contrast to Darth Vader, who had given himself over to the dark side, meaning that he only used the force crush his opponents and impress his will on them in oppression.

The force was the transcendent spiritual power that ran through the universe. Yoda taught young Luke Skywalker how to align himself with that power. He showed him that it was the source of our imagination and intuition. It was also the source of our humane values: compassion, mercy, understanding, care. And it was the way to find centeredness in yourself. It was how you attained peace, integrity, oneness.

It was quite clear that all of these could be perverted selfishly in sin. The force could become the instrument of aggression, greed, and acquisition. These too are spiritual realities that have tremendous impact on the psychic world, indeed they have more impact since they drive the powerful egos of the highest order of beings.

It is not a bad description of meditative prayer and the reality of sin in our lives. One of my professors in seminary once said that in prayer we are aligning ourselves with the love energy of the universe. We are releasing it in our lives and through us to the world around us. We are getting in touch with the force.

We are opening ourselves that we might become conduits, allowing a creative spirit to run through us to others around us. This was the Spirit that was manifest in Jesus to such an extraordinary degree. It was a spirit of healing, a Spirit of reconciliation, a Spirit of love. It centered him in God, gave him peace in himself, allowed him to see all other people with a view to their touching humanity and their precious needs rather than their position or their title. It gave him the courage to stand for what was good, what was right, even when it meant self-denial and it was painful. It allowed him to be authentic, to express the joy of life in celebrations at parties and weddings and to not only endure suffering, but find for it a place in the total human experience where it too can manifest grace. Suffering was no longer a mere negative. He harnessed the transcendent Spirit of God and embodied the values that make for a life lived abundantly and in so doing he lifted up a measure by which we could see the destructive power of spiritual transcendence when it is used for oppression, greed, dishonesty, indifference. He gave us something of a measure by which we could see just how inhuman we can be.

Brothers and sisters, celebrate the Spirit of God. Center yourselves in the transcendent force that runs through the universe. Find healing, centeredness in God and yourselves, become a conduit for love and reconciliation. Spread creative humanity each and every day. Slowly you are becoming the Children of God.